Billy Napier dug his own grave with Florida but refused to let the casket close

We here at Hail Florida Hail may have expressed once, twice, or even 57 times our desire for Florida Football to hire a new head coach during the course of the 2024 season. The Gators sank to 4-5 on the year, and Billy Napier was 15-19 as the head coach of the Gators before pulling off back-to-back upsets over LSU and Ole Miss, combined with a win over FSU, to close out the year with the feeling of hope and momentum heading into the offseason.

There have been certain entities wanting apology tours from those who dared to doubt Napier. We're not going to do that because it ignores why Napier was on the hot seat in the first place.

We will acknowledge, though, that against what many of us thought would happen, Napier is still alive and kicking as head coach of Florida with a massive opportunity ahead of him in 2025 to completely flip the narrative.

Florida Football: Six feet from the edge

Let's rewind to what we wrote after Florida was thrashed by Texas 49-17 in a game the Gators were down at one point 42-0. We had written in our piece."Florida Football fans are being gaslit to think this is normal," that:

"As the 2024 campaign has progressed, Florida has continued to gaslight fans into thinking that going 15-19 over the last three years is normal, that being 4-10 over the last 14 games is no big deal, and that we as fans need to rally around Napier if anything is going to get better."

Up through the Texas game, there were two main culprits as to why there was such little faith in Napier:

1. Napier has seven losses at Florida by at least 17 points. Even Ron Zook only had five losses by at least 17 points.
2. Coaching malpractice cost Florida a number of games they could have won.

Napier's lack of organization cost Florida the game against Arkansas last year. His lack of feel as a playcaller contributed to costing the game against FSU last year. And his lack of conviction and ingenuity cost him the game last year against Missouri.

"But wait a second, didn't 4th and 17 cost the game against Missouri?"

It did as well, which we have also chronicled was a bad defensive design by Florida coming out of a time-out, but Florida also had 1st and 10 with under two minutes to go and just needed one more first down to ice the game away.

Run

Run

Run out of bounds by a player who shall not be named

Fast forward to this year, and Florida looked massively unprepared for Miami and Texas A&M. Part of the root cause is that if you go back and look at the snap counts from those games, Napier gave guys 30+ snaps who would struggle to make the roster at Kennesaw State.

Then, against Tennessee, more coaching malpractice led to more disorganization and more bad play designs in key moments that gave away points in a game that Florida should have won.

See, the core defense of Napier is that he had to clean up a mess left behind by Dan Mullen. There is some truth to that, but it's disingenuous to pretend that Napier hasn't had the talent to work with to be better than 15-19 heading into the LSU game. Florida has had a top 15 Talent Composite roster all three years Napier has been in Gainesville, according to 247.

Napier had been so tied to this idea of being "consumed with the process," but as we noted over the summer, the hamster on the wheel is consumed with a process too, but that doesn't mean they are going anywhere. And too often, he has felt slow to react or unwilling to innovate in the game when it was clear Plan A wasn't working.